Palm Pilots example essay topic

My quality of life project no longer focuses around disabled people in fires it now deals with disabled people in an emergency and any safety agency. I am proposing a database on palm pilots for safety officials to carry around with them or even a telephone line, like 311, for disabled persons to register their names address and ant special needs they might have. 311 are supposed to be a non-emergency that was set up by New York for its citizens to call and find out various information. 311 are very busy the system seems to be in overload. I called 311 several times and each time I called I got a busy signal.

There are not enough operators to take care of the needs of the people. 311 is New York City's new phone number for government information and services. 311 is assessable to virtually everyone New York City residents, business owners, visitors etc. Among the many services accessible through 311 anyone can: Find out if alternate side of the street parking is in effect; Get information on services for the aging; Report a loud noise or blocked driveway; Learn about volunteer activities in your neighborhood; Learn about programs designed for small businesses; Give the Mayor your opinion; Report a pothole or street light that needs to be fixed; All calls to 311 are answered by a live operator, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and services are provided in over 170 languages. Dial 311 from within the City or (212) NEW YORK outside of the five boroughs. TTY service is also available by dialing (212) 504-4115. (nyc. gov) The 311 Citizen Service Center is averaging 17,000 calls a day.

"We expect that to go up to 30,000 calls once our marketing campaign is in full swing", said Gino Menchini, the city's chief information officer. "We " ve chosen to ratchet up our awareness so that we can better groom the call volume that we do have coming in and not get overloaded before we " re prepared to do it". (NYC's 311 system speeds calls for help, Ditya Sarkar) Palm pilots have been used to improve education and medicine. To qualify, educators had to develop an innovative plan to use Palm computers in the classroom. SRI worked with these educators to evaluate the impact of Palm computers on teaching and learning.

This research will help inform other teachers, researchers, hardware and software designers, and policymakers about best practices for using Palm computers in education. The PEP program offered two rounds, granting Palm computers to over 100 classrooms across the U.S. In addition, the PEP program has supported the work of other researchers investigating handhelds in education with grants of up to 15 classroom sets to 9 research organizations and school districts that conducted independent studies on teaching. November 2001, palm pilots were made available to all clinical pharmacists with the primary aim of assisting the documentation of clinical interventions. Teaching sessions in the department introduced basic palm pilot functions and described intervention recording techniques to all pharmacists. Initially, most pharmacists were apprehensive about using this new technology. A number of concerns were expressed, particularly in regard to misplacing the new and expensive tools.

Electronic formats allowed an increase in scope and circulation of reports and this has led to the pharmacy department receiving recognition for their interventions from both the RCH Medication Safety Committee and the Patient Safety Committee. All pharmacists have become more confident and willing to record their interventions. Additional uses and advantages soon became apparent. Drug references such as Epoc rates (R) and Micromedex (R), downloaded into the palm pilots, provide pharmacists with "on the spot" references which are useful during ward rounds and meetings.

Installed document readers allow documents such as protocols and imprest lists to be immediately available. The combination of both drug references and the document reader has lead to the additional use of palm pilots by the on-call pharmacist. The introduction of palm pilots to record clinical interventions made by pharmacists has been successful at the RCH. Additionally, the palm pilots are also being used by pharmacists as tools to improve clinical practice, and as source of information by the on-call pharmacist. Further applications, such as the development of an electronic version of the RCH pediatric pharmacopoeia, are being considered. Learning with handheld computers.

(Yeung S, Bogovic A) Yeung S, Bogovic A Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia